Pro Tip: How To Remove a Christmas Tree without Excessive Vacuuming

Maybe it’s just me, but I vacuumed my living room 3 times the day we take the tree out and I still find pine needles around. Those little guys get everywhere. This Pro Tip took me a few years to figure out. I would always take our tree out after Christmas and the poor dead thing would leave a trail of needles directly from our apartment door to the front of the building. (So there was no option to even have bad manners and blame it on your neighbor.) We keep these $1 plastic wraps on hand for messy projects. Just wrap up the ol’ tree before you take it out, simple as pie and no long vacuuming sessions.

Yeah, it's not like the plastic is disposed of with the three, it's only used for transport down to the curb, right?

My favorite tree-disposal technique: When I lived in NYC, we were in a third-floor walkup. Instead of leaving needles in our narrow front hall, and all the way down the stairs to the street, we tied a string to the top, shoved it through the window and gently lowered it to the sidewalk (with my roommate down below to guide it). That way the needles were only around the window.

When my husband and I were first married we lived in a condo on the 4th floor. We just tossed our tree right off the balcony onto the street below then went down and put it on the curb where the city would pick it up. It was mess free – and lucky for us, nobody got hurt.

Please tell me this is NOT this year's tree that is already down. I hate that we are so rushed to put it up, then its gone before New Year's. It's like the holiday equivalent of the senior's Early Bird Special….dinner by 4:30, and bed by 7:00!

We do something similar but we put the plastic christmas tree disposal bag underneath the tree stand when setting up the tree (poke the trunk through a hole in the bottom so the bag is over the tree stand). Then you just stretch the plastic up over the tree when you are taking it down- no needles anywhere!

I hope all of the people who are complaining about the plastic use made sure that their gift packaging was reused or recycled, that they brought their canvas totes to the store when buying gifts, and that they served a locally grown, vegan, organic meal.

This is the punishment I get for not catching up on my blog reading earlier today BEFORE we took the tree out this afternoon. Found this lovely nugget at designmom.com. I'm definitely remembering it for next year.

worked like a charm. bought my tree black friday and got rid of it today (jan. 10), so it was plenty dry and needles were coming off like crazy. thanks to my wife (and avid reader of your, http://love-lola.blogspot.com/) for helping us on this project.